Tag Archives: tube girl

On making your own V: The power of technology

πρὸς τοῖσδε μέντοι πῦρ ἐγώ σφιν ὤπασα…ἀφ᾽ οὗ γε πολλὰς ἐκμαθήσονται τέχνας. (“I gave them the gift of fire…and many arts they shall master thereby.”)

—Prometheus Bound, lines 252-4

Of course, as long as we are discussing the making of one’s own as Promethean act, we shouldn’t ignore the power of technology, which is now giving us such splendid mad-science visual representations as this:

That’s”Feel the Power” by Niceman, whose work we’ve seen before here at Erotic Mad Science, and gosh but he hits  so many right notes here:  a mad-lab setting, an erotic pose, a tube girl and possibly a created woman to boot.  And he did it with software.  (If you’re interested you can see a lot more of his work either at Deviant Art or Renderotica, although both sites might require some sort of registration to see the best material.)

Although I’ve written hopefully on the subject of computer generated art as a way of creating bespoke erotica I must confess to only have dipped in very little (some messing around with MakeHuman and Poser).  Still, I’ve been following computer-rendering for a while now and the signs are good.  If you compare the computer-generated image in this old post with Niceman’s work above, you can see that we’re getting across the uncanny valley bit by bit.  The images are better, and the software is doubtless getting easier and easier to use.  You might want to become a user now, or you might want to follow developments.  I’m sure they will be worth following.  With a little luck, you might have Pixar on your desktop in a decade.

In the meantime, I should also note that CG artists themselves also often take commissions.  Be generous!

On making your own III: Fetish Fuel Mining

From the title of the post, what did you think I had in mind?

(Found on a pop-up laden site I shan’t link to.)

Actually it was something a little different.

However strange you are erotically, you’re almost certainly not alone.  There are people like you, and they have been creating stuff in the past.  And now it’s buried.  It might be buried because it really was erotic in some way and the creators had to get it past the censors somehow.  Or it might be buried because it isn’t erotic to many people but it is to some.  Or it might just be lost, because it’s stuck inside popular culture that isn’t really very interesting or very good on the whole and so is largely forgotten.

But whatever it is, it’s out there, and if you’re diligent you can go out and dig it up and bring it back to life.    If you’ve been following Erotic Mad Science for any length of time you’ll have noticed my doing it a lot.  I’m into this weird thing with mad science.  The evidence is strong that there were a lot of people in the past who were as well.  But of course they were weird and unacceptable and so they had to get their crap past the radar somehow if they wanted it to see the light of day.

Crap past the radar: The tube girls are a good example.  If you were a sci-fi or fantasy editor working in mid-twentieth century America, you sure couldn’t get away with putting a naked girl right on the cover of a magazine.  But a tube, properly constructed, has some interesting properties.  It’s transparent, but on obvious way of constructing one involves segments held together by metal rings.  So you can put a naked girl in one, and of course her naughty bits will just happen to align with the metal rings.  And of course, the tube will play a part in the story:  she’s in cryo-sleep!  Being abducted by horny aliens!  Undergoing a transformation experiment!  Presto:  your porny art fantasy slips past the censor and onto the cover, which I am sure is most gratifying for both the viewer and for you.   Before you know it, there are tube girls everywhere.

Half a century later, a weirdo like me an go collecting them in service of his own ends.

Forgotten fetish fuel: The “personal identity porn” thing is probably not unique to me (I’ll admit it’s weird as a subset of my weirdness) and people who were making movies like The Four-Sided Triangle or Frankenstein Created Woman probably didn’t have weirdos like me in mind when they were filming (although you never really know).  They were making movies to make money.  Like most pop culture, they were mostly forgotten in a while.  But they were not gone, and they were there for me to mine up.  Watching these movies, and then being to explain what I think is interesting about them from a thaumatophile perspective, allows them to live again under a new interpretation, which is itself a form of creative act.

Of course, to perform that creative act, finding the little gems of eros amidst the dreck of mostly-dead popular culture can be a dirty business.

(Found on this Russian-language site.)

But don’t let that deter you.  The amount of material in the world is massive.  I’m willing to be even in my small, strange corner of the erotic world I’ve barely scratched the surface of what there is to know.  So get Googling!  And then share your finds and your new interpretations with the world. What you find will amaze you.

And arouse you.

The four-sided triangle

Sometimes you get lucky and find a movie that’s not all that well regarded critically but which hits all sorts of notes for you, and a recent discovery, The Four-Sided Triangle (1953), was that for me.  An early release of Britain’s mighty Hammer Film Productions, it sure does a lot for the thaumatophile, it’s a personal identity porn forerunner to Hammer’s Frankenstein Created Woman. And it pleases me all the more because my learning of it came from a different post at Erotic Mad Science, one presenting my then-latest search after tube girls.

Plot background: In the sleepy English village of Hardeen impoverished boy genius Bill, the son of the local squire Robin and blond beauty Lena grow up together as best friends.  Bill comes under the tutelage of the kindly but slightly dim Dr. Harvey. Lena is in time taken “back to America” by her mother (a good writing cover for the fact that adult Lena will be played by American actress Barbara Payton and won’t really have the accent), while Bill and Robin go off to Cambridge to learn science.  Bill and Robin will return to Hardeen and set up shop in an old barn, working on a mysterious mad-sciency project funded by Robin’s father Sir Walter.

Lena returns to Hardeen a little later, a broken woman very young: she’s tried many things and failed and returned essentially to die, as she tells a shocked Dr. Harvey in a line whose nihilistic spirit might have come from Iris Brockman.

Lena

I thought doctors were supposed to understand how little life really matters. There are many scapegoats for our sins and failures, and the most popular is Providence. I shan’t blame anyone but myself. I didn’t ask to be born, so I have the right to die.

(This is perhaps a little scary in hindsight for a reason in addition to the obvious one, given that Barbara Payton was at this point in her career in a downward alcoholic spiral that would lead to her own death at 39.)

Well, Dr. Harvey is having none of that, so he re-introduces Lena to her two childhood friends. Things go well, as Lena rejoins them as an assistant.

It turns out that Bill and Robin are working on a technology that allows them to reduplicate material objects with perfect fidelity.  After much effort they succeed.  Unfortunately, things don’t go so well on a personal front.  Love walks right in and wrecks destruction, as love has a way of doing.  Bill and Robin both fall in love with Lena.  Repressed-but-sensitive genius Bill dithers over expressing his feelings, while self-confident upper-class Robin has no such hesitation.  Robin proposes marriage to Lena, who accepts happily, leaving Bill devastated.

Soon Dr. Harvey finds Bill back in the laboratory, this time using his reproducing technology to recreate not just inanimate objects but living animals and…can we see where this is going, fellow thaumatophiles?  Yes we can.   Bill is planning to make a duplicate Lena for himself.

And here is where The Four-Sided Triangle takes a more interesting turn.  Instead of following a more traditional mad-science script in which Bill would kidnap Lena and have his way with her, Bill instead explains what he wants to Lena, and tender-hearted Lena agrees to take part.  Not that I want to dis the traditional plot, which certainly has its appeal, but at least this time I like the way this one was written so much better.  Do you remember, dear readers, my post on The Invisible Woman?

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here:  “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisibile?  Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

Well, I think I’m in love all over again (perhaps I’m about to get destroyed, who  knows?).

So Lena climbs into the apparatus.  Switches are thrown, lights flash, and so on.  Do you see the eccentric arrangement of the glowing tube in the background?    The people who made this film knew their mad science cinema.  They’re paying tribute to German Expressionism here, to Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or my name ain’t Faustus.

And of course, there’s the tube girl thing going on here as well.  Although contrary to tube girl tradition, and for that matter the “girl in the machine” precedent set by Kitty Carroll herself, she leaves all her clothes on.

Now why is that?  Doesn’t wearing clothes somehow make the whole duplication process a little more complicated?  This is dangerous stuff, people, and we need to do things right!

Oh wait, there’s that placard that I now remember from the beginning of the movie:

Okay, I get it now.

So anyway, the duplication process works once the duplicate is revived and Bill finally gets the love of his life.

Bill names the duplicate “Helen,” and they set off for a happy holiday together.

Only things don’t work out that well, because Helen is psychologically identical with Lena, and that means she still loves Robin.  Uh oh.  After a suicide attempt, everyone agrees to a radical measure — electroshock therapy to try to wipe Helen’s memory and give her a clean start.  Significantly, Helen herself agrees to this.  This is one amazing mad-science woman.

And maybe things work, but at this point the movie chickens out and runs away from its premise.  An electrical short happens, the lab burns down, and Bill and either Helen or Lena are lost to us.

That’s unsatisfying, but the movie still has a lot going for it, because it’s the cinematic playing-out of the old dream, brought to me originally through the study of philosophy, and discussed in my Thaumatophile Manifesto:

And he was also sometimes thinking about “…start with some pretty object of desire, gin up a few cloning-and-growth tanks, some superduper neurosurgery, and then maybe there will be…two objects of desire, at least one of whom might be free from certain social obligations, and..” Needless to say, the Inner Mad Scientist was chortling with delight at the prospect.

Some themes are just destined to be encountered, over and over.

Bonus animated gif from Bill and Helen’s “vacation” below the fold.

Continue reading →

Girlsicles

Janitor of Lunacy, commenting for the first time here at Erotic Mad Science, has pointed my attention to a small trove of tube girls, some of which I’d seen before, but others of which were new to me.  For example, this illustration is identified as being for Le Triangle a Quatre Côtés by W. Temple — I believe the British science-fiction writer William F. Temple, who wrote the novel that was made into the film The Four Sided Triangle (1954).

The context for these is a page at the site Project Rho, devoted to the problem of space travel, and how damn difficult it would be to stay alive long enough to actually get anywhere.  One possible solution:  freeze yourself, which is of course especially appealing if you are an attractive female and freeze yourself in a tube.  An illustration to Frozen Limit by “Volsted Gridban” (I think actually John Russel Fearn, another British sci-fi writer.)

A disadvantage of suspending your animation would appear to have been that you might have missed out on exciting events in your vicinity.

Another illustration, this I think from a story “Newscast” by Harl Vincent that ran in Marvel Science Stories, April/May 1939.

Trying to research the last turned up a bonus tube girl illustrating the Wikipedia article:

Like, wow.

The author of the Project Rho page remarks, perhaps a little apologetically, “I did not intentionally limit these illustrations to just frozen women. Apparently the artists of the time were not interested in painting men under glass.”  Well, let’s not be too sure.  I suspect rather that it was an audience consisting of hetero men and boys that wasn’t interested in looking at men under glass.  As for what might have been in the artists’ private sketchbooks, I do not know.

Though I really wish I did.

Live-action tube girl…Perfume

With a few exceptions, there aren’t that many live-action as opposed to fantasy-art tube girls, and given how tricky that must be to do as an in-camera effect, I’m not too surprised.  But I have found one that’s a real doozy.

It’s from an astonishing movie called Perfume:  The Story of a Murderer (2006).   Set in mid-eighteenth century Paris and Grasse, it is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille a man with a transcendent sense of smell.  Unfortunately for the maidens of Grasse, the smell that Jean-Baptiste finds most transcendent is that of a young woman, and this, in turn, leads him to become a serial killer who attempts various means of extracting and preserving the scent of women.

What he’s attempting here is an experiment to extract and preserve the scent of a young woman using a technique actually used by real-world perfumers called enfleurage.  Result:  tube-girl.

For such an unpleasant subject director Tom Tykwer sure gives us a lot of angles.

Although this particular method does not succeed, Jean-Baptiste eventually does come up with a means of extracting the scent of young women.  He often refers to this as their very essence or soul.   A familiar notion to readers of the scripts at Erotic Mad Science, I should think.

CORWIN

Yes, Anwei. The beautiful young Anwei, as liquid essence. Liquid girl! Feel..

Corwin tries to press the phial into Nanetta’s hand.

corwin

…she is still warm.

Even the visual image seems right to me. While a lot of critics seemed pretty put out by Perfume, you’d better bet that Dr. Faustus was mesmerized by it.

And when you combine the essences of many girls together, you get perfume just as magical as you do in The Apsinthion Protocol. Though just what the magic is, you’ll have to watch this rather squicky, scary movie to see.

On a sidenote, I have to say that a perfumer’s workshop, at least as created in this movie, is very much in the mad-scientist’s-laboratory, what with all the jar and phials of essential oils and distillation apparatus.

Yes, that is indeed Dustin Hoffman as a perfumer Baldini, giving Jean-Baptiste some of his first lessons.  Look later in the film for Alan Rickman in a tense, understated performance as the father of one of Jean-Baptiste’s would-be victims.

Continuing the shrinking thought

We’re more in the terrain of Aliens Behaving Badly than Mad Science here (though obviously there’s a lot of overlap between the two), but the image of the shrunken Professor Quartermass from yesterday’s post brought to mind a gender counterflip, involving women shrunken by a collecting alien and placed in strange-looking jars for transport back to the homeworld.  The images can be found on the Minimizer’s animation and video page:

The ultimate source here is a movie called Bad Channels (1992).  The Minimizer’s Shrinking woman and tube girl tropes are present, although since the captured women hit the sides of the tube and try to escape, or at least emote, A.S.F.R. isn’t.

Origins of tube girl meme?

I’ve done a lot of posts here at Erotic Mad Science about what I call the “tube girl meme,” the visual depiction of a pretty woman, often nude or scantily clad, sealed in some sort of transparent tube (often suspended in fluid) for the purpose of preservation, experiment, or some perverted purpose — let your imagination run free there.  It’s clearly a pretty prominent visual motif in the mad science genre and really takes off with pulp covers after the Second World War.  But where did it come from?

I’ll offer a conjecture, and kindly keep in mind that it’s only a conjecture so if any of you who read this blog know of an earlier or better one by all means please comment.   It goes back to a locus classicus of cinematic mad science, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

In this film, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, one of Frankenstein’s former teachers, demonstrates to Frankenstein a set of experiments in creating life, in this case Pretorius’s creation of a set of homunculi that live in cylindrical glass jars. It’s a pretty good effect, given that it’s 1935.

Among these are a dancer, (who, Pretorius laments, will only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song”)…

..and, perhaps more on visual point, a mermaid.

Origin of the concept?  Maybe.  I’m willing to bet that all those pulp artists and the public that patronized their work both watched Bride of Frankenstein a lot.

Bonus erotic trivia: The mermaid in the jar is played by Josephine McKim, a swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932 Olympics and who was the body double for Maureen O’Sullivan during her famous pre-code “nude swim” sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

Is there video? You betcha!

>

Of course we have also visited the contributions of Olympic swimmers to erotica on this blog before.

Shokoshu High School

Readers interested in the Gnosis College mad-science locus might enjoy a project with which it shares some affinities called Shokoshu High School, which showcases work done by creators Niceman and Stormbringer.  (I’ve followed the work of Niceman for some time at Renderotica and Deviantart for some time, and it’s a pleasure to see some work of vis out on the open web.)

Shokoshu High School is described as “…exclusive finishing school for girl students aged 18 and over is located…on a particularly pleasant semi-tropical island.”  Reassuring and agreeable!  And you can walk through the site, following scripts and encountering all sorts of curious goings on.  While the predominant tropes seem to be tentacle and monster sex, there is definitely some nifty mad science going on there as well.

Consider entering the science lab:

Just as you thought at first glance, within each cylindrical container floats the nude body of a young female. They all appear to be in their late teens, with well-formed bodies. Bubbles ascend through the fluid in the tanks and you realise that these girls are not dead. Rather they seem to be in some sort of suspended animation. Each face appears to have a rather sad expression and you find yourself wondering if active minds lie behind those blank eyes. You shiver and avert your eyes.

Well, excuse me Mr. Narrative Voice: perhaps you are averting your eyes.  Dr. Faustus is wondering where he put that academic curriculum vitae of all those years ago and wondering if there might not just be some faculty openings…

There are some fine examples of Niceman’s work, both in CG depicting a mad lab, complete with an instance of the tube girl meme:

And also an example of a live-action alter:

Doesn’t get more mad-sciencey than that, does it?

Mad Science inessential — The Atomic Brain

An early and probably malign influence from my childhood UHF TV-watching days was a 1964 movie called either Monstrosity or The Atomic Brain.  It had mad science, brain swaps, three lovely girls in terrible peril, the mind of a cat in a woman’s body, and the unholy quest for immortality by one of the most unpleasant old-lady characters to grace the grade-Z screen.

Despite all these pluses it feels overlong even at 65 minutes.  But oh, it does have its moments.

Such as an early cinematic naked girl-in-a-tube.  Two of  them, within the first ten minutes.  The people who made this might not have been great writers, but they sure knew about getting sexploitative early.  Here is the second of them:

The poor naked thing is a corpse, stolen froma nearby graveyard.  The man in the radiation suit is our anti-heroic mad scientist, attempting to revive her tissues (by means of “atomic fission, produced in the cyclotron,” according to the narrator), so that he can then implant an animal’s brain (!) in her.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well, and she ends up merely as a zombie.

Maybe this movie isn’t quite so bad after all.  Is it available at the Internet Archive?  But of course!

Enjoy if you can. (And if you can’t just a little, why are you here?)